Cheshire

Also, if the Flipper Zero can clone your bank's card, you should probably switch to another bank.

It's a neat tool, and it can definitely do a lot, but it's not magic, and it can't emulate decent cards with proper security. If your bank card doesn't have that, that's… an issue.

I mean, I mostly just wanted to humorously dunk on cops, but if you want an actual argument:

Cops have an entire TV genre dedicated to propaganda in their favor, which can lead otherwise decent people to believe that they aren't that bad and join up.

So, it's possible for a person to be both a decent person and a cop… but not for long. It can't last since they soon either stop being decent, stop being cops, or have "accidents". But can good cops exist? Yes, if only for a short.

(And I'm intentionally using "decent/good person" rather than "not a criminal" because what's criminal and what's immoral are two separate things. Cops can use asset forfeiture as essentially a form of highway robbery, but doing so is technically not illegal, and thus not criminal.)

Now that's just not fair. Criminals actually risk getting in trouble for breaking the law.

Also, gangs usually work in their own neighborhoods, while cops rarely work in the places they live.

Police are much closer to an occupying army than a criminal organization. (And that's before the literal militarization of their equipment.)

On a similar note: In German, "seven hundred fifty three" would be said as "seven hundred three and fifty".

At least it's consistent - starting at "thirteen" , which is "three ten", up to ninety nine, which is "nine and ninety", the multiples of ten come last.

It is pretty annoying, though, when a number like 123'456'789 is spoken as 132-465-798, though.

Apparently, it's because in old Germanic, the numbers were spoken "backwards" (one hundred twenty three being spoken as "three and twenty and hundred"), and we only partially reversed that.

Maybe not all cops are bastards.

But they all certainly "match the description".

There's a correlation between eyesight and intelligence (in species, not individuals) - interpreting visual inputs takes a lot of brain power, and might be one of the factors pushing for greater intelligence. So, there's at least a decent chance that intelligent aliens would have good eyesight.

Also, they'd need hands, or something equivalent.

Once you have hand(equivalent)s, decent eyes, and intelligence, hand-eye-coordination isn't far off.

If elephants can figure out how to throw rocks with enough force to kill a child, then so can E.T.

Between liking cats, favoring the colors purple and blue, and enjoying humor based on twisted logic, choosing "Cheshire Cat" as namesake seemed obvious.

Don't get your hopes up.

Microsoft is now working on Windows Copilot, a new sidebar for Windows 11 that is powered by Bing Chat and can control Windows settings, answer questions, and lots more.

They're already working on a successor.

I don't think you're missing anything.

It's just tradable karma on the blockchain.

Oh, it also had the [evil] tag, which means that just how a spell tagged [fire] releases elemental fire into the world, a spell tagged [evil] releases pure evil energy, magically making the world a worse place… somehow. For reasons. 3.5 loved to give alignment mechanical effects, it had one or two books (Vile Darkness was technically for 3.0) entirely dedicated to hard rules for morality.

But 5e doesn't have tags like that, and alignment is almost irrelevant. Which is probably for the better, because alignment is incredibly subjective.

Raise Dead is fine, it's the second "become alive again" spell after ~~CPR~~ Revivify.

Animate Dead is the "get skeletons and zombies" spell.

That being said, the various re-alive-ing spells are kind of the best reason for a "necromancy is evil"-argument. Or at least, they used to be.

In 3.5, nothing - not even True Resurrection, which was just "name dead creature, creature pops up next to you, alive" - could bring someone back who had been turned undead, until the undead had been destroyed.

Which means the easiest way to prevent someone from getting brought back to life was to turn them into an undead skeleton and hide them somewhere, nothing short of direct divine intervention would be able to return them to life unless something destroyed the skeleton.

This strongly implied that turning the body into an undead also trapped and enslaved the soul. After all, otherwise, True Rez - requiring nothing but the name of the target, and able to straight up build a new body from scratch - wouldn't fail to rez someone just because their body was desecrated.

Now, in 5e, True Rez says that it can be casted on an undead to return them to life, but also only that it can restore a body "if the original no longer exists", which I guess implies that simply embalming/non-necromantically mummifying the body and hiding it away would also work (since the body still exists that way, and thus 5e's True Rez wouldn't build a new one), making the only notable difference between an undead and a corpse that the undead might not hold still during the resurrection.

Basically, Necromancy went from 3.5's "implied soul slavery" to 5e's "corpse desecration, which is a cultural construct".

Ah, but the Welsh clearly have no culture and must therefore kindly be uplifted by the English. Just like how Russia is currently trying to uplift Ukraine.

(And just to be sure: /s. Imperialism is bad, no matter what national brand.)